The views expressed in the following post are strictly those of its writer Mayank Chhaya’s. In no way do they capture the sentiments, implicit or explicit, of Jay Mandal, the photographer of the photographs above and below showing India’s Foreign Minister S M Krishna being escorted with umbrellas.Any suggestion to the contrary is purely fallacious, fantastic and in the mind of the one suggesting.

Perhaps the best way to ascertain someone’s importance in India is to count the number of people that reflexively holds aloft their umbrellas to protect that person when it rains. The measure works even when umbrellas are held up against an intense sun. I mention rain because it is more dramatic and visually more compelling.

How much clout you exercise is directly proportional to the number of umbrellas that goes up when it rains or, equally persuasively, the number of people that tries to feed you when you break your fast after a hunger strike. If I extend that logic, the ideal combination would be when you break your fast when it is raining. The sheer choreography of protecting you from the something as threatening as water even while urgently feeding you can get extremely complex.

I have never understood why Indian politicians and celebrities cannot carry their own umbrellas even if I understand the guilty pleasure of lackeys and handlers and attendants doing menial jobs for you. One feels precious when fussed over thusly. I am personally very uncomfortable with being fussed over. Fortunately, there is no danger of that ever happening to me.

As the pictures above so serendipitously illustrate, the pecking order automatically becomes the order of pecking. There is a subtle obsequiousness to the body language of the holders of the umbrellas. It is fair to say that I am making too much out of a routinely courteous gesture. What is on display here is not particularly comment-worthy. May be so but the point is it does happen to those in authority, exuding authority or close to those exuding authority.

Those for whom umbrellas prop up from many different directions or glasses of lime juice materialize out of thin air it is a very hard habit to break or privilege to give up. I suspect that is why politicians push their retirement as close to their death as possible quite like movie stars. It is the fear that there will be no one to spring with umbrellas in their defense at the time rain.

September 29, 2012

Jay Naidoo has the bearing of someone who should be approached only if you have an urgent point to make about a global crisis. His goatee and mustache only enhance that effect. In reality, he is far more affable.

These days, Naidoo, a seasoned South African political dissident and campaigner who would easily fit in a Che Guevara music band, is comfortably ensconced in positions such as a member of the Broadband Commission of the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) and United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). He is also on the Global Advisory Health Board for the World Economic Forum and Patron of ‘Scatterlings of Africa’, a paleontological foundation linking archaeological sites across Africa.

But there was a time when Naidoo was one of the leading campaigners against South Africa’s apartheid.His official biography says that he was the founding General Secretary of the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) where he served three terms (1985 to 1993). “He was at the forefront of the struggle against apartheid leading the largest trade union federation in South Africa,” it says.

After apartheid was dismantled and with the rise of Nelson Mandela, Naidoo made an easy transition into political life. From 1994 to 1999, he was the Minister responsible for South Africa’s Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP) in the Office of the President.He went on the become the Communications Minister in Mandela’s Cabinet.

I met Naidoo during a just concluded conference on global transformation in Mumbai. I was an observer on the sidelines. He was a participant who had just returned from one of New York’s two biggest billed annual gatherings in September every year—The Clinton Global Initiative. The other would be the United Nations General Assembly, although it is becoming harder to tell which one is more influential.

I conversed with Naidoo during various breaks yesterday but could not possibly write about it because I did not tell him that I was planning to. However, among the more interesting points he made about Africa in general during the deliberations, there was one about how the giant continent accounts for 70 percent of the world’s arable land. That makes it a prime agricultural real estate which major nation-states are eyeing and grabbing to ensure their own food security. (The last line is my construct and not his). China and India are among the prominent names that have rapidly established their presence there from the standpoint of food security, more so China than India.

Naidoo also mentioned how the continent’s population is likely to touch two billion from the current about one billion by 2050 and significantly impact the global dynamic. As the world’s other exploitable resource bases shrink, Africa remains largely untapped, although in recent years there has been a dramatic turnaround. China with her despot-agnostic foreign policy is able to exercise considerable influence by not making its economic aid conditioned upon political or human rights reform. India, on the other hand, has always taken a more nuanced and humanitarian route even while keeping her eye on the continent’s enormous natural potential.

One of these days I will interview Naidoo. For now, I have divested myself enough of free wisdom on yet another global issue.

September 28, 2012

It is rare that you meet and get to know someone and then never meet that person again. At any rate, that has been the case with me. It is as if one meets a person only if one is going to meet them again.

I have no scientific basis to say this and perhaps it is an example of sophistry but one likes to think that there are no chance meetings in life. Even as I say this I reject it but you would grant that as speculation goes this one is not too bad.

While in Mumbai to chronicle a conference on global transformation, I ran into an old friend from the world of journalism in the 1980s who is now a reasonably high-profile political activist. Sudheendra Kulkarni is an influential member of India’s main opposition Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) as well as a former advisor to Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee. People in India may know him from his regular appearances as a TV pundit and a newspaper columnist.

An alumnus of the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Bombay, Sudheendra is an odd presence in politics. He dwells in a political space where you least expect him to be and yet he has emerged as a cogent proponent of the rightwing BJP worldview. Interestingly though, in his telling it is hard to discern the discommoding angularities of that philosophy. For my own amusement I call him a closet Marxist-liberal whose door is wide open. He used to be a communist who says his transformation into his current avatar was caused by Gandhi.

Sudheendra and I renewed our contact after nearly two decades. He smiled assertively as he entered the conference room and saw me. An effusive shaking of hands and half executed side hug and we were back to our old familiarity. After this, that and the other, I found out that he is about to release his tome ‘Music of the Spinning Wheel—Mahatma Gandhi’s Manifesto for the Internet Age’ (Amaryllis, 2012). At the end of the first day of the conference Sudheendra had produced about a dozen copies of his book for the attendees, including me.

I will write a separate piece and interview with Sudheendra later but I thought it might be a good idea to quickly introduce the book to a wider audience. Implicit in that sentence is the claim that this blog represents that wider audience.

The broad theme of Sudheendra’s book is probably summed up by this observation early in the book: “In the course of my study, I discovered to my own amazement that the future world shaped by digital technologies could well validate and actualise the fundamental philosophy of the spinning wheel.” The spinning wheel, for those who may not be aware of such things, came to symbolize Gandhi’s political belief system built around the more practical and simpler nature of industrialization.

Sudheendra’s seems to be an intriguing premise and a cursory glance through the book’s pages indicate some measure of scholarship. This is all I am going to say about a book I began leafing through barely half an hour ago. More on this later.

In the mean time, let me see who else I run into in the town where I cut my teeth as a journalist in 1981. It is ironic that despite all the properly planned personal meetings in Mumbai using my Facebook network, the first friend I run into was so serendipitous.

September 27, 2012

It is amusing how people, including some professional journalists, confuse the medium with the message. So much so that many of them think that the medium is the message.

As India’s information and communications technology pioneer Sam Pitroda took to Twitter yesterday in what was billed to be the country’s first official news conference on the social media, in certain quarters the denunciation was swift and largely knee-jerk. The detractors’ main grouse can be distilled down to the complaint that Pitroda did not answer “tough” questions.

Merely because someone chooses a particular means of communication, in this instance Twitter, does not in and of itself guarantee candor and openness. I cannot say one way or the other whether Pitroda navigated the questions in order not to deal with the “tough” ones because I chose not to take part in the event. News conferences as a way to obtain information of any sort stopped mattering to me as a journalist in the very first year of my career some 30 years ago. However, knowing Pitroda as well as I do, I can tell you that he is not the one to duck any question on the grounds that it is tough. He may have sidestepped many on the grounds that they were not relevant to the theme he had chosen for the Twitter news conference.

To the point whether Pitroda answered the questions in the spirit they were posed in or even whether he even chose to deal with the challenging ones, it is a matter of personal judgment. My contention is that anyone’s appearance on Twitter or Facebook or Google Hangout does not automatically impact the quality of information that the person may choose to share. Those are just the medium and not the message. The novelty of someone in authority answering questions on the social media could not possibly last more than a few seconds, if even that.

The reasons why such events resonate in the media is because one they are so rare and two because they create a somewhat misleading impression of a government opening itself up to unfiltered scrutiny. In the end it boils down to the individual temperament of the person answering questions. In Pitroda’s case, he has generally been known to answer direct questions without finessing them with officialese. That said, it will serve well everyone concerned to remember that all news conferences are an exercise in spin.

The main reason why many in the media, as well as generally among citizens, think that the government is always holding back or skewing or spinning or simply lying when it comes to sharing information is because so few are available to answer questions. So when someone like Pitroda or even Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi chooses to make themselves available questioners go off on tangents. They are so starved for credible information that every time someone in authority becomes available, they would be inundated with all manners of questions. The result, more often than not, is a sense of disappointment.

For such interactions to become vigorously meaningful they will have to become widespread across the entire government at the federal, state and local levels. Pitroda’s theme was “Democratization of Information”, something he has been steadfastly committed to for a long time. His more immediate task is to put tools, as in widespread and affordable broadband connectivity, and systems, as in the infrastructure on which to share information, available across the country. That is the first significant step towards the laudable goal of democratizing information. The second more important and way more demanding step would be to create among politicians and government officials a sense of candor and transparency as well as the recognition that their entire existence revolves around what people make of them. That is something that will require a fundamental societal transformation. Pitroda personally can only take a small first step.

Can that happen? Your guess is as good as mine. My personal impression that there is pressure building up at the citizens’ level to make that happen. The only thing worth remembering here is that the medium is not the message. The message is the message.

September 26, 2012

As always, in affairs of the heart my heart always goes out to the more mundane and practical aspects.

Take for instance, the much rumored/reported relationship between Pakistan’s fetching Foreign Minister Hina Rabbani Khar and Bilawal Bhutto Zardari, chairman of the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP). Bilawal, as many of you might know, is a son of his country’s slain former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto and current President Asif Ali Zardari. As political lineages in South Asia’s sycophantic politics go it could not get bluer than this. Even if he does not do much more than just calmly breathe and blink his eyes from time to time, it is a fait accompli for him to one day lead Pakistan. (Let’s not introduce the vicious uncertainties and vicissitudes of being a high profile Pakistani politician here.)

I am not for a second lending credence to a report of their alleged relationship that first appeared in a Bangladeshi tabloid called Weekly Blitz. The story has been inevitably picked up by the Indian media with barely hidden glee. That said, my concern in this entirely is practical. If true, and that is as big an if as any in Pakistan, and if they do choose to get married, another massive if, the prospect of using “Hina Rabbani Khar Bhutto Zardari” does not appear to be practical in a news copy. My takeaway from this is just that much. Just saying it makes it sound as if the person is boasting about the enormous and historic political power packed into it.

Everything else is inconsequential for me. None of the issues that send many into moralizing paroxysms over a 35-year-old married mother of two, not to mention a serving foreign minister of the world’s most troubled country, having a relationship with a 24-year-old heir apparent to the same country’s political power bother me.

News reports have spoken of how the two were “caught in compromising positions” are laughable because the whole purpose of a love affair is to get into “compromising positions” as frequently as possible. And what is “compromising’ about those “positions”?

Speaking of positions, I take none on what Khar’s current husband Firoz Gulzar might have to say about this. Nor do I have any on what Bilawal’s father, the president, has to say about it, although if the affair does indeed exist, he would conceivably have an earful to say about it. I can guarantee that most of it would be strictly for Bilawal’s ears.

Perhaps the best indication that the foreign minister has run into difficulties over this alleged affair would be if she is asked to resign by her Prime Minister Raja Parvez Ashraf under promptings from Zardari. None of that has happened yet, nor, for that matter, any credible voice has commented on it. If true, there are so many grounds on which Zardari may disapprove but none as potent as the chilling effect it can have on his party’s electoral prospects in general and his son’s rise in particular.

I personally put no stock in this story, not because of its dubious sourcing but because it means nothing to me. Two life forms of any gender of any species feeling drawn to each other should hardly constitute news. What should make even less news are the ‘compromising positions.”

P.S.: I am not sure whether it is the same Weekly Blitz in question but here is a link to what appears to be so.

September 25, 2012

Sensory overload is so 20th century when it comes to describing life in India, particularly in Mumbai.

As I landed in the city last night, the ride home from the international airport to my brother Trilochan’s apartment in Versova gave me some time to think about new ways to capture the experience.I can’t say I have yet settled for a compelling term but let’s go with the very inadequate and even patronizing surreal for the limited purpose of today’s post. I say it is patronizing because it attributes to the unfolding of life in front of one’s eyes, a touch of the unreal or unprocessable when, in fact, for those who are living it it is all too real and comprehensible.

What became emblematic of that drive for me was the sight of two street vendors, both women, standing in front of two wicker baskets full of fluorescently illuminated toys such as balloon yoyos and bubble makers. Both wore plastic horns glowing with every conceivable color and lighting up their faces in a manner that made them look like apparitions from an altogether different realm. I saw a few bubbles land on the horns and popping.

What enhanced the effect for me was the constant beating of the drums and whipping up of oddly shrill music from the ubiquitous electronic synthesizers mounted on trucks. They were all part of what are these days daily ceremonious immersions of thousands of plaster of Paris Ganesh statues in the Arabian Sea during the annual festival of Ganesh Puja.

I navigated at least a dozen such processions, each full of people swaying in a trancelike state perfectly synchronized with the drums. Hundreds of policemen and women, surprisingly not harried by the goings on, directed the impromptu processions with the practiced ease of those who could not care less. Many of them were chatting on their mobile phones even as some of them swung their canes to control the participants.

As someone who is so primordially familiar with such scenes I had no trouble taking it all in without thinking much about the sheer, well, sensory overload. I intend writing more as I go along. For now let’s just live with the sight and sound of the women wearing fluorescent devil’s horns and rhythmic beating of the drums.

September 24, 2012

As I prepare to leave for India in a few hours I can barely contain my excitement at the prospect of flying economy.

After all who does not relish a verdant, open expanse of some 30 inches of seat pitch (legroom) and obscene luxury of being ensconced in a seat as wide as 17 inches or so? For me what is likely to compound the sheer bliss would be that I am taking a non-stop Air India flight from Chicago to New Delhi stretching about 15 hours straight.

On this august occasion, even as the United Nations begins its annual general assembly in New York today, I would like to republish a short post I wrote on March 6, 2011. That way I can preserve all my energies for the flight ahead. This is what I wrote then:

It is time for the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner of Human Rights (UNHCR) to declare economy class air travel as a serious human rights violation. Anyone who has suffered the indignity of spending any time in any economy class seat on any international flight would testify if the U.N. were to hold hearings on this issue.

These seats are unforgivably narrow. They seem to get narrower as the flight progresses. I often get the sense that the two arms on either side of the seat collapse into each other as part of a grand aviation industry conspiracy. The industry just does not like economy class passengers. Pretty soon it will offer only armrests without the seats in between in the economy class.

What makes economy class travel on long haul flights even more harrowing is the seat configuration of 3-4-3. If you end up in the middle—and purely statistically you would end up there several times—then there is absolutely no hope for you. You are better off dead than being caught in the middle seats on a 16-hour flight.

The UNHCR should summon all airline CEOs, put them on a 16-hour nonstop flight, seat them all in the economy class with 3-4-3 configuration and hold hearings for several days. They should be asked just one question for those 16 hours—“Are you comfortable?” I guarantee their answer will get progressively depressing every second of the duration of the flight. By the time the flight lands they would be ready to make all flights mandatory business class flights at the economy fare.

P.S.: I fly out of Ahmedabad tonight to return to Chicago by economy class. I happily admit to resenting the fact that I will never be able to afford business class travel in this lifetime. First class does not even exist in my niggardly universe.

P.P.S. (Added today): Business class travel continues to be out of reach. And first class is like some fabled place on the mountain top which exists only in whispers. I have a new name for my kind of travel—Flying under economy aka Phew!

September 23, 2012

Expressing opinions, as it is done in these columns from time to time, requires no talent. It mostly requires flagrant impertinence mixed with some measure of reasonable understanding of issues at hand. Above all, it requires conceit that others actually may feel compelled to read them.

With that rider out of the way, I have been meaning to say a couple of things about CNN’s decision to use contents of the slain US Ambassador to Libya, Christopher Stevens’ private journal and produce a news report around it.

The State Department is so exercised at CNN’s decision to build a story out of the personal diary that Philippe Reines, senior adviser to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, called the network’s action “disgusting.” It is not everyday that the fountainhead of diplomatic tact, namely the State Department, calls a media outlet’s conduct disgusting. He also called CNN’s action “indefensible.

The basic facts are that CNN reportedly found in the charred and burnt remains of the US consulate’s compound at Benghazi the personal diary of Ambassador Stevens. Being a private journal it ought to have contained a lot of unfiltered and candid information and observations. News reports as well as direct comments by Reines suggest that CNN’s first reaction was to read the diary with the obvious intention to turn it into a news story.

In a statement Reines has been quoted as saying, “Whose first instinct is to remove from a crime scene the diary of a man killed along with three other Americans serving our country, read it, transcribe it, email it around your newsroom for others to read, and only when their curiosity is fully satisfied thinks to call the family or notify the authorities?”

Watching CNN’s Anderson Cooper last Wednesday assert with extraordinary certainty that Stevens was worried about the security scenario in Benghazi as well that he was on Al Qaeda’s hit list, I did feel a bit odd about the sourcing. There was something to Cooper’s demeanor that suggested that he was privy to much more than what he was letting the viewers in on. My first reaction was “How is he so sure?” As it turned out he did have a direct access to Stevens’ own writings, a fact he did not mention on that particular broadcast. He was not obliged to mention his source.

It was only when the story about the journal started unraveling and the ambassador’s family reportedly expressed displeasure at its content being reported did CNN and Cooper issue an explanation. "Some of that information was found in a personal journal of Ambassador Stevens in his handwriting. We came upon the journal through our reporting and notified the family. At their request, we returned that journal to them. We reported what we found newsworthy in the ambassador's writings," Cooper said on Friday.

The basic controversy, dispute if you will, here is whether a news organization should have acted in the manner CNN did on the basis of what it found on a sovereign property in the aftermath of what was obviously a crime. It is also about whether the contents of a private journal are an acceptable source of news, particularly when they go to the very heart of now increasingly troublesome questions about the level and quality of diplomatic safety and security in Libya. It is equally about whether a news organization has the right to disseminate the contents of a personal diary of an official even before his family or the government has seen it. And finally, whether CNN was being less than straightforward in saying that it had informed Stevens’ family its intention to broadcast some of the materials.

I wish I could answer all of the above with a simple yes or no. In many ways this story is a classic test of the media’s rights and responsibilities. It is also one of those tests which the media can never fully pass or fail, no matter what course it chooses. My gut tells me that while CNN, like many others, may have gathered a fair amount of information on its own strength to raise questions about the ambassador’s safety, it owed its unusually confident tone almost entirely to the contents of the journal.

I do not say this in hindsight. Even while watching Cooper’s broadcast in question, as a professional journalist I was rather intrigued by his demeanor. At the risk of overstating it, I even felt that he was battling hard to contain his sense of certainty about what he was saying. One image that flashed through my mind then was that of a poker player holding all the aces and yet not letting that information ripple across his face.

This much is clear to me. No news organization would have let the contents go unreported. The question is mainly about when to report and how much to report. I don’t think that reporting it before Stevens’ family or the government had had the chance to review the journal was in and of itself violative of anything other than perhaps good form. What complicates the debate,however, is that, as Reines rightly points out, it was a crime scene and the diary did indeed constitute evidence.

On the other hand, the fact that the diary was found when there was no known forensic operation on does mitigate CNN’s conduct somewhat. A news organization must primarily act as a news organization first and foremost. In most circumstances it is not the job of a CNN correspondent, or for that matter any correspondent, to also double up as a custodian and protector of interests other than that of media freedom. That begs the question—did this fall under the “most circumstances” category?

A CNN story yesterday said that the organization “notified Stevens' family about the journal within hours after it was discovered and at the family's request provided it to them via a third party.

It said, “The journal consists of just seven pages of handwriting in a hard-bound book. For CNN, the ambassador's writings served as tips about the situation in Libya, and in Benghazi in particular. CNN took the newsworthy tips and corroborated them with other sources.”

As you can see, what is happening here that I am indulging in circumlocution. That’s because the debate is not as sharply right or wrong, moral or immoral, ethical or unethical as many would like to believe. The only point I would make with any degree of finality is that at the very least CNN should acknowledge that its “first instinct”, as Reines points out, was to “remove from a crime scene the diary of a man killed along with three other Americans.” But even there CNN might argue with very thin justification that it was officially not a crime scene when it found the journal.

I think in the end this comes down to bad form versus good form more than anything else. But then whoever said that it is the media’s job to arbitrate between the two? Its job is to get the story out as long as it is in the larger public interest.

September 22, 2012

My boat moored along the coast of the Fantastic Republic of Magic Wandistan (Illustration: Mayank Chhaya)

It may be a bit late in the day to insert a new item for action in the United Nations General Assembly’s (UNGA) agenda as it begins deliberations on September 25. Nevertheless it would serve the international community well to consider announcing an indefinite moratorium on the use of at least two expressions by global leaders.

It is my strong recommendation that the 67th session of the UNGA as well as the UN Security Council outlaw the use of two profoundly useless and counterproductive expressions “There is no magic wand” and “Money does not grow on trees.” One can safely say that most leaders have used these two expressions either directly in English or their comparable local variations in their own languages.

I have been advocating the banishment of these expressions for a long time unless of course their users can empirically prove that both are possible under certain circumstances. I wrote this on August 21, 2011: “Here is an expression that ought to be banished from public use: “There is no magic wand.” The latest politician (which makes him Number 205 billionth) to use it is India’s Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. He has said there is no magic wand to eliminate corruption.

Politicians say “there is no magic wand” as if they have tried their hardest to look for one but couldn’t find it. Their tone would suggest barely hidden anguish that there is actually no magic wand and they have the onerous duty to report the tragic finding of their quest to the suckers at large like us.”

It is ironic that it is the same Dr. Singh who has just used the expression “Money does not grow on trees.” India’s prime minister, who has been battling hard to convince the country that it needs a new round of strong economic reform, addressed the nation yesterday explaining why the country has to do what it takes to strengthen its economy. During that address Dr. Singh was making a point about how hard it is to maintain government subsidies, particularly on petroleum products. His decision to increase the price of diesel has added fuel to the already raging political fires around him. This is how explained the rationale:

“We import almost 80% of our oil, and oil prices in the world market have increased sharply in the past four years. We did not pass on most of this price rise to you, so that we could protect you from hardship to the maximum extent possible.

As a result, the subsidy on petroleum products has grown enormously. It was Rs. 1 lakh 40 thousand crores (about $31 billion) last year. If we had not acted, it would have been over Rs. 200,000 crores (about $45 billion) this year.

Where would the money for this have come from? Money does not grow on trees. If we had not acted, it would have meant a higher fiscal deficit, that is, an unsustainable increase in government expenditure vis-a-vis government income.”

One cannot dispute the economic soundness of Dr. Singh’s argument about the subsidies because they need to be funded by the government and as we well know money does indeed not grow on trees. My objection to the magic wand and money trees is that leaders use them as if there are people in this world who actually believe that either one of them really exists.

There is a pretty good chance that those who believe in the magic wand also believe in money trees. If nothing else the UNGA can announce the formation of a new country called the Fantastic Republic of Magic Wandistan whose national emblem will be the Money Tree. I have already penned the first two verses of its national anthem. It is a work in progress.

September 21, 2012

The only phobia, if I can really call it that, I have is this lurking sense that bits of food are stuck on my mouth while eating that requires me to take big bites. As a rule I avoid eating food that cannot be easily sliced into tiny pieces which can be slipped in without so much as touching the periphery of my mouth. Phew! I am anal.

Every Time I am thrown into a situation which compels me to take bigger bites, as in the case of subway sandwiches or tortilla wraps, I find myself constantly wiping real and imaginary scraps of food. With advancing years the radius of around which I wipe my mouth has expanded. The first round of wiping is done with a paper tissue, followed by my own handkerchief. It has become a source of some amusement among my friends here in America that I actually carry a hanky. Some of them think it is a very “gay” thing to do. Eating thus becomes a burdensome experience for me.

Ever since I became an adult I have entertained this idea of keeping a small convex mirror next to wherever I am eating to check every few seconds whether food pieces are hanging on to my mouth. There is something unforgivably inelegant about food sticking to one’s face while eating. I have seen people with scraps of food perched on their eyebrows. That takes some talent, man!

This phobia has helped me create a character in one of my three upcoming novels of a Mumbai gangster called Aaina Luchhela, approximately meaning Mirror Wiper. His henchmen carry a large mirror whenever he goes out dining. They arrive at a diner before Aaina does to survey and comb the place to ensure that there is enough room to put the mirror in a way that their boss can constantly look into it. He also has this eccentricity of requiring his suppliants to talk to his reflection in the mirror.

There is a scene in the particular novel where Aaina Luchhela figures in which he is supposed to kill a man who has not paid his dues. The man is utterly terrified at having been asked to meet Aaina in his private office which is full of mirrors. This is indeed written as a movie scene because it is very cinematic. The corridor leading to Aaina’s office is all mirrors, including on the floor. It is like walking into the tunnel of narcissism.

To cut the long story short, after being told why he was summoned the man awaits a gunshot through his head. Instead Aaina says, “Choose any mirror around you. Go ahead, do it.”

The man, already resigned to his last moments, chooses to look at the ceiling mirror. Then in an inexplicable change of heart, Aaina points his gun at the ceiling mirror rather than the man’s head. He fires at the ceiling mirror. Splinters fly all over, some of which cut Aaina as well. He laughs and says, “It was your reflection’s day to die today. Pay when you can.”